A call to elect the elections chief

King County lawmaker to launch initiative drive

By GREGORY ROBERTS, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Updated 10:00 pm, Monday, September 12, 2005

King County voters would choose their top elections official at the polls, just like voters in the state's 38 other counties, if an initiative campaign headed by a Republican County Council member succeeds.

The Initiative 23 campaign is to be formally announced today by GOP Councilwoman Jane Hague of Bellevue, who was the county's elections director in the early 1990s. Under the King County charter, the elections director currently is appointed by the county executive, subject to council approval.

Other counties elect an auditor who heads the elections department. The initiative calls for King County voters to choose an auditor in a non-partisan election, beginning in 2007.

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"An elections official who is directly accountable to the people will make the changes desired by the people and the public," campaign manager Tim Jackson said Monday. Jackson works part time on Hague's communications staff.

If the initiative campaign succeeds in gathering 46,000 signatures by Nov. 28, the proposal will go before the County Council, which could modify it before submitting it to voters for ratification in November 2006, Jackson said.

GOP politicians -- including County Councilman David Irons of Sammamish, who is challenging Democratic County Executive Ron Sims in the November election -- have called previously for an elected auditor. A Sims-appointed task force said in July that the county should consider the change in order to increase accountability.

That task force was charged with reviewing the elections department in the aftermath of the 2004 general election, which was plagued in King County by a host of errors and mistakes, including tabulation of hundreds of provisional ballots without the required voter validation beforehand, the overlooking of more than 100 absentee ballots until it was too late to count them and a failure to reconcile accounts of votes cast with voters voting.

The GOP put those foul-ups at the heart of its unsuccessful legal challenge to Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire's 129-vote victory in the November balloting.

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GOP County Council members have called for Sims to dismiss the appointed elections director, Dean Logan.